No gods and precious few heroes: transatlantic dispatches from Alex Massie

April 16, 2007

America Under Siege

More aggression aimed at under-mining American values: this time it's punters under the cosh, led astray by mysterious, foreign horse-racing practices. In other words, the use of artificial racing surfaces such as Polytrack, spreading across the country to corrupt American racing.

According to the WaPo's Andrew Beyer, Polytrack - pioneered at English courses such as Lingfield - produces:

A mutant version of horse racing that penalizes thoroughbreds for being fast

Un-American! Beyer's complaint is that races at Keeneland, in Lexington, have become, well, too european. instead of a flat-out sprint from tape to post horses are jockeying (ha!) for position prior to kicking for the finishing line. This is the way things are done in europe, where racing takes place on good old natural grass, not dirt. Polytrack, though an artificial surface, much more closely resembles turf conditions than dirt.

The difference seems startling:

Since Keeneland installed Polytrack last fall, the surface has turned
the game there upside down. American racing has historically favored
horses endowed with speed; its breeding industry has invested billions
of dollars to produce such horses. Yet at Keeneland, a track that used
to be dominated by front-runners, speed has become a liability. Of the
first 48 races run on the surface last year, only one horse was able to
lead all the way.

Mind you, Beyer does have a horse, so to speak, in this fight. As Ted McClelland observes:

Beyer is best known as the inventor of the Beyer Speed Figure,
a tool for comparing races run under varying track conditions.
Horseplayers are debating whether speed figures will work on Polytrack,
which is designed to sieve rain and perform the same in all weather. A
traditional dirt track is banked for drainage, so water collects at the
rail and may slow down the horses who run there. Racetrack regulars
like Beyer make good money spotting horses hampered by such track
biases and betting them the next time they race. Polytrack, which is
supposed to run the same every time, could kill that angle.

No wonder european-style tactics risk turning racing into a farce: who could want a surface fair on all horses instead of one dependent upon drainage patterns?

But what most struck me about Beyer's complaint was his very American insistence that everything measurable be measured. The uniformity - more or less, or at least much more so than turf - of dirt conditions has fostered an American mania for timing horses down to the last hundredth of a second, as though it makes much difference to a horse's greatness that it can complete a 1/2 mile in 46.86 rather than 46.99 seconds?

This is fine as far as it goes. Which isn't far.

Still, the notion that something might not be easily measurable runs hard against the American grain. It's one reason (among many) why some Americans remain suspicious of soccer: statistics can't tell you much about a players' contribution. Similarly, horse-racing in Britain and Ireland has never much bothered about times (as turf tracks have varied conditions).

Myself, I'd have thought horse-racing could stand some surface variety and perhaps reward different styles of horse. But maybe not. Still, there's something very American about the desire to measure, or find empirical, definitive evidence upon which to rank horses. They are horses after all. Yet there you have it: beating on against the current and all that. The stuff that makes fortunes but, perhaps, robs us of some mystery...

1 Comment

As a fellow transplant, I too have noticed a difference in American attitudes to sport, but I don't think that an obsession with measurement is the right explanation. After all, cricket is awash with statistics, and rugby coaches are starting to adopt NFL-style statistics to good effect.

I suspect rather it is something to do with a profound dislike of the element of luck. Americans don't want sports events to be decided by luck. So NFL players spend ages discussing each play to try to make sure they get it right, while rugby players call most plays from within the midst of the action. Baseball players wear gloves to make sure they never drop catches, but cricketers use bare hands. Perhaps the horse racing thing is another manifestation of this.

Of course I have no empirical evidence, but if you want to run an experiment, try asking a selection of European and American sports fans whether they would have been happy if, in Saturday's FA Cup game, United had failed to score despite dominating the play, and the game had been won by Watford through a lucky break-away goal.